eBay Hears Our Concerns About Neutral Feedback

Posted by Carlos Valdez
July 12, 2008

eBay just announced they will not include neutral feedback as part of your feedback percentage. After a few months of voicing your concerns, they finally do something.

Along with the neutral feedback change, they will also place a mechanism to allow buyers to change their feedback. They state people do make mistakes and this is a way to correct the mistake.

I was very shocked to see eBay doing a major change is such a short time frame. eBay has a history of needing to take about a year before they make major changes. I for one am glad to see that eBay is taking a proactive approach to it’s sellers. Win one for the sellers this time.

Here is the announcement (July 10, 2008)

Earlier this year we made significant changes to the Feedback system to improve seller standards and give buyers even greater confidence and trust when buying on the site. As a result we’ve already seen more sellers improving their standards, as measured by Detailed Seller Ratings, and fewer buyers reporting bad experiences.

At the same time we’ve heard concerns from sellers about key areas of Feedback. Based on what you’ve told us, we’re making the following changes:

Recalculating Feedback percentages without neutrals
Effective in late August, neutrals will no longer be counted as part of the Feedback percentage. This means we will be recalculating Feedback percentages retroactively for users worldwide. In the interim, no one will lose their PowerSeller status as a result of neutrals being included in their Feedback percentage.

Helping you resolve disputes and satisfy buyers
By the end of October, we’ll introduce a new process to help sellers resolve disputes with buyers, even after Feedback has been left by the buyer.

This will give buyers a way of changing or withdrawing Feedback in certain limited circumstances. Please note that this is not a re-introduction of the old Mutual Feedback Withdrawal process, which could be abused by some sellers to place undue pressure on buyers to withdraw their Feedback.

We’ll provide more details of this new process soon.

We’ve also recently received lots of feedback from sellers about the Seller Non-Performance programme. We’ll provide an update on changes to this programme early next week.

Thanks for your continued commitment to making eBay such a great place to buy and sell. We want to continue an open and constructive discussion with both buyers and sellers while we make major improvements to the marketplace; it means we can respond quickly to address your concerns, and introduce ideas that benefit everyone.

Regards,

The eBay Team

Click here to verify this information.

I’m sure there are many seller, especially PowerSellers, who are happy with this announcement. They no longer need to worry about buyers leaving neutrals and actually having them act as negatives. I’m very happy to see eBay doing something about this. Now if only they can do something about the DSR.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think about eBay latest changes.